An uneven but ultimately compelling attempt to provide a 'people’s history' of the country ... The pace here often feels slow, the detail about both the hotel and the author’s journalistic challenges excessive and the prose occasionally prone to what sounds like TV-speak ... [Doucet] also makes the distracting choice to refer to herself in the third person ... Doucet does have an eye for the black comedy of successive regimes assuming control of both country and hotel ... For a good chunk of the book, I questioned Doucet’s choice to tell the country’s story through this particular place ... But at some point, the book rises — or falls — into the more representative history Doucet aims for ... And a somewhat plodding, occasionally frothy book becomes both riveting and sad ... Doucet’s long focus pays off ... Deeply felt.
Charming and often surprising ... Doucet succeeds in making the hotel an oddly successful frame for a sweeping social history of Afghanistan over the last half century and a moving symbol of its remarkable ability to endure whatever horrors fate has thrown at it ... What sustains the book is Doucet’s focus on the ordinary Afghans who keep the place going ... In Doucet, and her witty, observant and sometimes heartbreaking book, they have found a worthy chronicler.
Doucet’s telling is far from grim. It’s full of warmth, wit, and a lovely eye for the human stories that make the hotel not just a monument to tragedy, but also love and resilience ... This is the book about an Afghanistan I never knew that I always wanted to read ... What Doucet achieves is both powerful and charming at the same time. The Finest Hotel in Kabul is a meditation on memory, resilience, and the strange intimacy of public spaces.
Doucet is a consummate storyteller who can recognise a great yarn when she sees one. Relating a history through the prism of place is a nifty, if well-used, literary device, but the real strength of this book is her ability to get under the skin of a country through its people ... An easy read, but it is not always easy reading ... Engaging ... Haunting, hopeful and occasionally harrowing, The Finest Hotel in Kabul is much more than a history. It is a love letter to Afghanistan and its people.
Nuanced and affectionate ... Through Doucet’s writing you can taste and smell the rich fragrances and textures ... It’s impossible not to wonder about the fate of those people whose lives the events in Doucet’s book touched ... This is a beautifully written and observed book by one of the finest journalists of her generation. Doucet’s sympathetic writing is at painful odds with the absolutism into which the Taliban are again inexorably dragging Afghanistan’s people.
Not so much a history, but a series of biographies ... The sense of intimacy Doucet creates, made possible only by the trust built up over years with her subjects, turns a dizzying string of key dates and turning points into something more akin to immersive theatre. It’s epic, told on an intricately domestic scale.
